Opening the Curtains

Happiness is a strange thing because most people talk about it as though it is a destination. A place you arrive. A finish line stretched across some distant road after you've survived enough storms to finally deserve it. It is packaged as a reward, handed out to people who have endured the correct amount of suffering and learned the appropriate lessons along the way. Movies end with it, always freezing the frame at the exact moment the characters finally exhale, as though life politely stops once joy arrives. Songs promise it just around the next corner, tucked inside the next relationship, the next season, the next version of yourself. People ask if you've found it yet as casually as they ask whether you've found your keys, as though happiness might be sitting in the lost and found beside missing umbrellas and single gloves, waiting patiently for someone to claim it. We speak about it like an address, like a city you eventually move to, like there are maps and directions and mile markers along the way. But I have never experienced happiness that way. It has never felt like a destination to me. It has always felt more like weather. Something that moves in and out without permission. Something you cannot hold onto no matter how tightly you close your fists. A shaft of sunlight slipping through heavy curtains. A bird landing briefly on a windowsill before taking flight again. The kind of thing you only realize was there after the room has gone dark.

I don't think happiness has ever looked that way for me. When I was younger, happiness looked like noise. It looked like all four of us crammed into the same room, talking over one another, laughing too loudly, arguing about something insignificant that none of us would remember a week later. It looked like my brother making some completely inappropriate joke at exactly the wrong moment, somehow breaking the tension in a room that had become too heavy. It sounded like my mother's voice on the phone, calling for no particular reason other than to tell me something small about her day or to ask what I was making for dinner. It smelled like holiday meals and crowded kitchens and people moving around each other without needing permission because they belonged there. It was family dinners where conversations overlapped and nobody had to earn their seat at the table. It was Monopoly games full of shifting alliances and justified cheating, and Wii bowling competitions where the argument over who was truly the champion somehow lasted longer than the games themselves, despite everyone knowing it was me.  It was the quiet certainty that no matter what happened outside those walls, there were still people standing shoulder to shoulder beside me. Happiness wasn't something I searched for or measured or questioned. I didn't stop to examine it because I was living inside it. It was oxygen. It was the steady rhythm of lungs expanding and contracting without conscious thought. It was the background music of my life, playing so softly and consistently that I only noticed it after the song stopped. You don't spend much time appreciating your ability to breathe until someone puts their hand over your mouth. You don't realize how much light filled a room until someone starts turning off the lamps one by one.

In 2017, something inside me cracked. Not with the dramatic sound of glass shattering, but with the quiet, terrifying groan of a foundation beginning to give way beneath a house that still appears perfectly intact from the outside. My grandfather died in January, and before my heart could even begin to understand what it had lost, my mother died in May. Four months later, we buried my eighteen-month-old niece. Three funerals. Three sets of flowers. Three caskets. Three moments of standing in rooms filled with people speaking softly while my entire world came apart in deafening silence. The losses arrived so quickly that my mind never had the opportunity to put one grief down before another was placed into my arms. It felt like standing in the ocean during a hurricane, each wave striking before I could regain my footing, before I could even remember which direction the shore was supposed to be. Every time I managed to surface long enough to take a breath, another wall of water crashed over my head and pulled me under again. But somehow, through all of it, I still had Chris. I still had my older brother. I still had my sister. We became this small, battered raft floating in the middle of an impossible storm, four people clinging to one another because there was simply nothing else left to hold onto. We spoke the language of our grief fluently because it belonged to all of us. We didn't have to explain why certain songs hurt or why holidays felt unbearable or why some days it took everything we had just to answer a text message. One sentence was enough. One look was enough. The others already knew the entire story because they had lived it too. We carried the same ghosts. We mourned the same people. We took turns keeping each other afloat when one of us began to sink. No matter how broken I felt, there was still comfort in knowing that we were broken together. We were wounded, but we were still a unit. We were still the remaining pieces of something that had once been whole. And then Chris died.

People talk about grief as though it breaks your heart, as though it arrives like a hammer and leaves behind visible pieces that can eventually be gathered and glued back together. That isn't how it felt. A broken heart still beats. A broken heart still aches because there is something alive inside it capable of hurting. What happened after Chris died felt far more sinister than that. It felt as though somebody reached inside my chest and quietly removed something vital while leaving the rest of me intact enough to continue functioning. Do you remember the dementors in Harry Potter? Those terrible, wraith-like creatures that entered a room and stole the warmth from it. The air grew cold around them. The light dimmed. Laughter disappeared. Even your happiest memories became distant and inaccessible, as though someone had locked them behind thick glass. And if they gave you the Dementor's Kiss, your soul was simply gone. Your body remained. Your lungs continued breathing. Your heart continued beating. But the essential thing that made you you had vanished. That is the closest description I have ever found for what happened to me. Not sadness. People understand sadness because sadness still contains life inside it. Sadness still cries. Sadness still reaches for people. Sadness still loves. Sadness still secretly believes that someday the pain might ease. This was something else entirely. It was sitting in a room filled with people and feeling absolutely nothing. It was hearing laughter and being unable to remember why it used to sound beautiful. It was looking at photographs of people I loved and feeling as though I was viewing someone else's memories. It was waking up every morning to a world that had lost all of its color, as though someone had drained the pigment from the sky and the trees and my own bloodstream. It was the absence of feeling. The absence of hope. The absence of believing that joy even existed somewhere beyond the horizon. It was not pain, exactly. Pain implies that something is still alive enough to hurt. This was emptiness. A hollowing. A terrible, silent vacancy where happiness used to live.

I wasn't crying every day. I wasn't falling apart in dramatic ways. I wasn't standing on bridges, writing goodbye letters, or leaving people with reasons to worry about me. From the outside, I was remarkably unremarkable. I got out of bed. I cooked dinners. I answered text messages. I attended birthdays and school functions and sat through conversations about ordinary things while secretly feeling as though I had become a ghost wearing my own skin. I was simply hollow. I felt like a house after the fire had already happened, after the firefighters had left and the smoke had cleared. The walls still stood. The windows were still intact. The furniture sat exactly where it had always been, untouched and recognizable. But everything that made it a home had been reduced to ash. People would ask if I was okay, and I would say yes because technically I was functioning. I was parenting. I was meeting obligations. I was doing all the things that living people are supposed to do. I looked alive enough to pass inspection. Nobody checks whether the lights are actually on inside the house as long as the porch light still works. But internally, I had become very quiet. Entire sections of myself went dark. The part of me that dreamed. The part of me that planned for the future. The part of me that expected good things to happen. For a long time, survival became the goal. Not happiness. Not healing. Not joy. Just survival. If I made it to bedtime, that counted as a victory. If I found something to laugh about, it felt almost suspicious, as though I had accidentally wandered into the wrong emotion. If I made it through a holiday without excusing myself to cry in a bathroom, I considered that a success. I lowered the expectations for my life so gradually that I never noticed the ceiling descending around me. I stopped asking for more because more had become synonymous with loss. Every beautiful thing I had ever loved seemed to disappear eventually, and somewhere deep inside me, my brain made a bargain: if you expect nothing, nothing can be taken from you. I stopped imagining happiness because losing it had nearly killed me once already, and I wasn't sure I would survive watching it die a second time.

The strange thing is I didn't even realize how small my world had become. That's the cruel trick about survival mode: it never introduces itself. There isn't a siren. There isn't a diagnosis. There isn't a letter in the mail informing you that somewhere along the way you have traded living for existing and called it healing because existing hurts less. It happens so quietly that you mistake it for maturity. You tell yourself you've become realistic. Practical. Strong. You stop making plans very far into the future because experience has taught you that the future has sharp teeth. You stop wanting things too badly because wanting feels dangerous. You stop letting your imagination wander because hope begins to resemble a liability. The radius of your life becomes smaller and smaller until it consists only of responsibilities, obligations, and making it to tomorrow. One disappointment at a time. One funeral at a time. One loss at a time. One betrayal at a time. You surrender tiny pieces of yourself so gradually that you never notice the pile growing at your feet. The restaurants you no longer visit. The songs you stop listening to because they hurt. The dreams you quietly retire. The places you no longer imagine going. The version of yourself who used to believe life might still surprise her. Until eventually your life becomes a house with all the doors locked and all the curtains closed, not because you wanted to shut the world out, but because somewhere along the way you convinced yourself that nothing good was coming to the door anyway. And after enough years pass, your eyes adjust to the darkness. You learn the shape of the furniture. You move carefully through the rooms. You call it home. You forget there was ever sunlight on the floorboards. You forget there was ever a view outside the windows at all.

Then someone comes along and opens a window. Not dramatically. Not with grand gestures or sweeping declarations or promises they cannot possibly guarantee. There is no movie soundtrack swelling in the background. No scene where the clouds part and the light pours in all at once. Just presence. Consistency. Showing up. Making room. The steady, almost unremarkable kind of love that doesn't arrive carrying tools and blueprints, announcing that it intends to rebuild you. It doesn't kick the door down, demanding to save you from yourself. It doesn't ask you to become smaller, easier, or less complicated in order to stay. Instead, it simply sits beside you in the dark long enough that your eyes begin to adjust differently. It listens. It stays. It returns. And one day, without realizing when it happened, you notice that you have opened the curtains yourself. That is what happened to me. Not all at once. No lightning strike. No movie moment. No sudden realization that I had been healed. It happened in ordinary moments that were so small I nearly missed them entirely. Laughing so hard my stomach hurt and realizing I hadn't done that in years. Looking forward to a phone call instead of dreading what the next day might bring. Wanting tomorrow to come. Planning things months away without immediately preparing myself for disappointment. Caring about music again. Finding songs that made me feel something other than survival. Driving somewhere with excitement instead of obligation. Catching myself imagining a future and realizing, with almost startling surprise, that I was actually inside it. Somewhere along the way, without asking permission, happiness came back. Not the version I had before. That girl died alongside many of the people she loved, and I finally stopped waiting for her to return. This happiness is quieter than that one was. Softer. More cautious. It walks with a limp. It checks the exits in unfamiliar rooms. It knows how quickly life can become unrecognizable. It sits beside grief instead of trying to replace it. It understands loss because it was born inside the ruins of it. It grew, somehow, from the same scorched ground where I once believed nothing living would ever grow again.

Sometimes I think happiness is not the absence of pain at all. I think we spend so much of our lives believing that healing means eviction, that joy cannot move in until grief has finally packed its bags and left. We imagine the heart as a room with limited space, convinced that sorrow and happiness are enemies that cannot survive beneath the same roof. But maybe happiness is simply discovering that your heart was built larger than you realized. Maybe it is learning that it can hold both. The sorrow and the joy. The cemetery and the sunrise. The empty chair and the future dinner table. The memory of a funeral and the sound of laughter drifting in from another room. For years, I was convinced that Chris took happiness with him when he died. I don't say that to be dramatic. I say it because it was true. I genuinely believed I had already experienced all the joy my life was ever going to contain and that the rest of my life would simply be endurance. I thought I had reached my emotional limit. That whatever portion of happiness had been assigned to me had already been spent, and all that remained was learning how to survive the years that followed. I stopped looking for joy because it felt cruel to search for something I was certain no longer existed. I was wrong. Not because grief left. It didn't. Not because I healed completely. I haven't. Not because I became the woman I was before all of this happened, because she no longer exists either. I was wrong because happiness is far more stubborn than I ever gave it credit for. It waits. Patiently. Quietly. It sits outside locked doors for years without knocking. It slips through cracked windows when you are not paying attention. It settles into ordinary moments and waits for you to notice it. It survives in the places you stopped looking, growing like wildflowers through broken concrete, proving over and over again that even the things buried beneath loss are still capable of reaching toward the light.

And one day, usually when you aren't paying attention, you realize you are laughing without forcing it. Not the polite kind of laughter you give other people to reassure them that you're okay, but the kind that escapes before you have time to stop it. You realize you are making plans months into the future without immediately bracing yourself for disaster. You realize you are hoping, which is perhaps the bravest thing a grieving person can do. You realize that someone has gently expanded the borders of your world simply by staying, by returning day after day, by proving that not everything you love is destined to leave. I spent years trying to survive. I became so good at endurance that I mistook it for living. I learned how to carry grief, how to function beside it, how to smile when necessary and keep moving even when every step felt heavy. But I never realized that somewhere along the way, entirely by accident, I had started living again. And perhaps the strangest thing of all is this: I spent so many years mourning my ability to be happy that I didn't recognize happiness when it finally came back. I was looking for fireworks. I was waiting for triumph. I expected some grand moment where I would stand on a mountaintop and announce that I had conquered grief, that I had defeated the dementors, that I had finally reclaimed my soul. But happiness returned so quietly that I almost missed it. It was answering the phone and smiling before I even realized I was smiling. It was opening the curtains after years of living in rooms I had convinced myself were safer in the dark. For so long, I believed the dementors had won. I believed they had taken every good thing from me and left behind only an empty shell that knew how to survive but had forgotten how to live. But they didn't take everything. Somewhere beneath the grief, beneath the years of surviving, beneath the rubble and ash and silence, something remained. Some stubborn, fragile piece of my soul kept breathing in the dark, waiting for enough light to find it again. And now, after years of believing I would never feel truly happy again, I find myself standing in the warmth of an ordinary life, realizing that happiness did return. Not as the woman I used to be. Not as the life I once had. But as sunlight falling across the floorboards of a house I thought would remain dark forever, reminding me that there was still enough of me left to feel its warmth.

Perhaps that is what I will carry with me most. Not that happiness returned, but that someone was there to witness it. Someone who met me in the darkened rooms, who sat quietly beside the ruins, who never demanded that I become who I was before. Because after years of believing I would spend the rest of my life surviving, there is something almost sacred about being seen while you begin living again. He did not become the sun. He simply sat beside me long enough for me to remember that the curtains could still be opened. And my God, after all these years, I had forgotten how incredible the sunlight feels on my skin.